Web Configurator Slow
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I don't have much evidence as to what may be happening, but I have been having major delays navigating the Web Configurator.
I am currently on the version (built on Wed Feb 08 14:19:05 UTC 2023). I started noticing the problem about two versions ago. Around this time, I started using the DNS resolver in pfSense in recursive mode. Previously my piholes would forward DNS to cloudflare. I now have the piholes forward everything to pfSense. I carefully checked all my configuration and DNS seems to be working perfectly.
When I experience the delays, it seems like opening the Web configurator in a Private / incognito tab fixes the problem. This made me wonder if it is somehow the cache in my browser causing the slowdowns. I have tried ctrl-F5 but the slowness persisted.
On yesterday's build (2/7/23), I was adding the rest of my devices as static assignments in DHCP and it was taking between 10 - 20 seconds or more each time I would click on edit or save for each client. Sometimes it would take 10-30 seconds for the web configurator login screen to come up.
I have no other configuration changes and have never experienced these slowdowns before. I am using HAProxy and the web configurator is on port 8181 behind the proxy so I can use ACME certs for all my internal stuff. Again, this has all been setup this way for quite some time without any issues.
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@cwagz It used to be a common issue that the GUI was slow if pfSense itself had incorrect DNS and lookups timed out. You might double check the setting (system/general) or test on the diagnostics menu.
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@steveits - Thanks for the response. I ran a bunch of lookups through the diagnostics menu, and they all complete without issue. pfSense is using 127.0.0.1 only. No external DNS servers are specified in the General setup.
I did just try using an inPrivate tab to initially access the web configurator and it was delayed by many seconds as well so my theory on the browser cache is no longer valid.
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Any other ideas on what I can look at in the logs to see what is making the interface hang for long periods of time?
Sometimes it is fast and works like it should. Other times it can take a very long time for the login page to load or even to navigate once inside the web configurator.
I have experienced the issue with Edge for Windows and Edge on macOS.
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@cwagz Not specifically...I'd check CPU and RAM usage at the time.
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@steveits - I think I figured it out. For whatever reason the HAProxy configuration that has worked with previous versions of pfSense seems to be having an issue with my setup now.
I had a DNS Resolver host override defined to send requests to pfsense to my internal only VIP that HAProxy binds to. HAProxy would then send everything to the backend at port 8181. This let me use the web configurator without having to append the special port number.
If I access pfSense directly by adding the port number it works fast like it used to. If I access pfSense through HAProxy there are huge lags.
The weird thing is I do not have problems with any of my other things that are behind this same VIP and being proxied. They all work fine. It is just the pfSense web configurator that seems to be affected.
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Apparently this was a configuration issue on my end or something weird with unbound and host overrides.
I had removed all my custom DNS entries from the piholes since I was now forwarding everything to pfSense to be resolved.
I had all the correct Host Overrides in the DNS Resolver on pfSense, but somehow the piholes were caching both the direct IP of each server (from the static assignments in pfsense I guess) behind HAProxy as well as the VIP address assigned by the host override. Basically, the lag was caused by there being two IP addresses available from the pihole for all the servers behind HAProxy.
I have added the custom DNS entries back to each pihole so they will send only the correct internal VIP address. This seems redundant since I would expect pfSense to only reply back to the pihole with the host override ip address I had entered. I am not sure why the static IP from DHCP in pfSense was being sent to the piholes along with the host override IP address.
